Although Part Time Ghost ended with a whimper, playing a semi-acoustic show as a three-piece at the Lion’s Lair in September 2022, the band had been on life support since that April when Keiton announced he was moving from Denver for financial reasons. 

Money kills more bands than drugs ever could. 

There was never any discussion of continuing without him. 

We had found Keiton a year earlier amid the COVID shutdown, after a frustrating, months-long search for a bass player.

Before he joined – and after Nic and I had let Brady go without any plan to replace him – I tried splitting my rhythm guitar signal in two, sending one to my guitar amp and another through an octave pedal and EQ gate and into a bass amp. This worked…um, pretty poorly. While plenty of great bands (Sleater-Kinney, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The White Stripes) can make due without a dedicated player holding down the low end, we discovered that we were not one of them. 

Keiton, who’ll forever be one of my favorite bandmates, was the perfect fit. A jack of all trades, Keiton can play, sing, write, and produce. He’s the type of guy who can chop it up with the dudes, but puts women at ease. I’ve never met anyone who met Keiton and didn’t like him. I wouldn’t want to. That person would be fucked up. 

Keiton’s also a bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy fun, fun, fun, fun, fun Tigger on stage, which is a bonus for any four-string swinger, whose personalities typically tend to be stoic or reserved.  

We knew we weren’t going to find a better mate than Keiton, so we knew that once he left, the band was kaput.

But we still had all these fucking songs to record.

As I said in “Lovin’ Your Homies, Pt. 1,” I didn’t really realize that Part Time Ghost wasn’t a garage band or an indie rock band until we folded. We were a jam band, and we had spent the previous year building out a setlist in the very unlikely event that we would be enlisted to play two-plus hours of original music. 

…Which, come to think of it, we actually did, exactly once: 

I want to take the time now to thank Keiton for letting us know he was leaving ahead of time, and for the rest of the band for going along with it when I forced the recording process upon them. 

Unlike playing shows or even practicing, recording isn’t typically very fun. It’s exacting, boring, and repetitive. And while it’s a hoot to make faces and that hand gesture that Trump does where it looks like he’s jacking off two dicks at once while someone’s recording, it’s actually detrimental to the process. Recording can be No Fun Time. And, unlike recording our first album Songs of Death and Love, I don’t have many fond memories. In fact, I don’t have many memories of it at all. 

Frankly, we could’ve finished out our run with Keiton with a few fun summer shows, some laughs, and some memories, but we wouldn’t have had Apocalypse…Now-ish. 

As an album, I think it’s an improvement on Songs of Death and Love. It’s certainly more cohesive. 

When Brady was in the band, he sang his songs and I sang mine, which made the album feel like the work of two different groups. You may disagree, but I think Keiton and I figured out how to better play on each other’s songs. 

Although I have some hang-ups with the recording (mostly faults with my voice and some of the decisions we made when recording guitars), I like this set of songs, and think it’s a solid sample of what we could do. 

Apocalypse begins with Keiton’s “Chi-Chi,” whose monster riff made up for the fact that it’s about the Dragon Ball Z character. Even a hateful elder millennial like me could deal with some weeb-ishness if it’s attached to a lick that jumps out of the speakers. 

My relationship with “Freeloader Baby” goes back almost 20 years, when I wrote it for the surf/garage rock band The Insinerators. Other than Josh’s wah-wah solo, it’s unchanged from then. 

It’s amazing, you carry these songs with you until you get a chance to release them. Now it’s time for me to let it go. Thank god. 

I’m pretty proud of the songwriting on “The Second Hand.” The descending verse progression begins with a Bmsus4 and gets weirder from there, but it’s held together with high e pedal tone that appears in every chord. 

Its lyrics about a man killing his wife and her lover while they’re in bed is a tale as old as time, but got super lucky that the onomatopoeia (“click”, “drip”, “pop”) lined up  with the rhythm. Usually writing a song with such short lines is much harder than writing one with longer ones, but everything came together for this one.

The Ghosts support it perfectly by underplaying.   

When Keiton first joined the band, he gave us a stack of his music and asked if we wanted to re-record any of his tracks. “Holy Wars” was a no-brainer. It’s funny, groovy, and has an explosive chorus.

I’ll also take blame for the guitar solo, which I rushed in the beginning. Thanks for the opportunity. Sorry I fucked it up. (Which could be the name of my autobiography.) 

Inspired by the riff from Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf,” I wrote “Lifting Weights” about the most garage rock theme imaginable: the aftermath of a break up. Unlike its companion “All, You Know, to get over You” (which’ll appear on a follow-up EP in a couple weeks), “Weight’s” spurned lover doesn’t improve. He gets worse. And he tries to take down the whole world with him. The “Apocalypse” part of Apocalypse…Now-ish is no joke, even if this song kinda is. 

Also, Josh just tears up this guitar solo.     

 I’ve never written anything like “My New Future Bride” before or since. The song began as a progression played in drop D that I thought sounded like U2, until its dumb, amiable protagonist appeared out of nowhere and turned it into an honest-to-god country song. I love the idea of a Walter Mitty-ish hero who falls in love with women he spots in traffic and feel that I can’t take credit for the song because it basically wrote itself. 

I will however take credit for having Keiton sing on it. My vocals are fine, but Keiton makes our protagonist sound so much more friendly and gentle. My guy still feels like a bit of a creep. 

“Spaniel” dates back even before my time with The Insinerators, but we updated it for the 2020s (cops didn’t really get into the Punisher until Jon Bernthal played him on Netflix).

The chorus is dumb, the verse riff is dumb, and the lyrics are silly, but Josh’s solo, Keiton’s bass riff, and the way Nic double taps an off-beat on “my god,”  just shows how a good band can really prop up a dumb song.    

Also, the backup vocals make me laugh. Between albums one and two, we learned one of the band’s greatest strengths was its backup vocals. I could imagine a future where album #3 didn’t have one lead singer, so much as four of them. Alas… c’est la vie.

“Castle Bravo” is the first song I ever wrote, but we gave it a thorough reupholstering and a new bridge for this recording. While sequencing, I probably should’ve considered that “Spaniel’s” chorus goes “no” and “Castle Bravo’s” goes “whoa.” Never mind, I did that intentionally.

My favorite memory of recording: Nic’s ten-second scream during the final verse. 

I don’t know if a band of mostly white guys should’ve written a song about African colonialism from a MI-6 mercenary’s POV, but on “Leone 1991 — Lumumba 1960” we did. (For the record, as if it’s not clear by the song itself, we’re not pro-.)  

Musically the track is our most adventurous. Josh wrote its push-pull main riff with the harmonic minor scale, and I kept adding pieces to it, much to Nic’s chagrin. He hated the song until it finally came together, at which point it became one of his favorites. (That we added a drum solo probably didn’t hurt.)  

During the first round of mixing, Keiton reimagined the outro and spliced in relevant bits of Patrice Lumumba’s 1960 Congo independence proclamation. He’s also responsible for the effects during the bridge and third verse. 

I think the second verse is about as information-rich as I could write a lyric before it turns into a textbook. Kind’ve a mouthful, though. Don’t imagine Taylor Swift will be covering it any time soon. 

Written the month before Rudy Gobert shut down America after catching COVID-19, “…on a Sunday” foretold the apocalypse that would swallow us all in 2020, and closed our shows more often than not in 2021 and 2022. 

The romantic cynic in me liked the song abruptly crashing to a close with the image of a new couple kissing as the world ended, but we added the “Love never dies” outro to lighten it up. I’m glad we did, because I believe it casts the whole album in a more benevolent glow. 

Part Time Ghost made music because we loved it, but also because we loved (and still love) each other. 

By and large, the world is a tough place and living is hard, but being able to play music and make albums with your friends makes it a whole lot easier. 

If you like, you can buy Apocalypse Now…ish here.